The clearest signal that the Pacific has gone strange this summer weighed 151 pounds and came over the rail of a tuna charter.
Tim Durheim, of Prineville, Oregon, was fishing albacore 40 miles off Ilwaco aboard the Four Sea'Sons on 15 August when a striped marlin ate a black and pink jig. Striped marlin are a subtropical species. Washington's coastal water in August typically sits between 53 and 63 degrees; the fish prefers 68 to 77.
"We were trolling and it came up once hit, disappeared, then came back two minutes later and hit again right at the surface and went down," Durheim told the Chinook Observer. "Then we proceeded to battle it for a little over an hour."
It ran hard enough to nearly empty the reel of 80-pound braid, and never showed itself. "I was about 30 minutes in and I still hadn't seen the fish," he said. "Then we saw the stripe. It never surfaced until we brought it to the boat."
Weighed at Sportsmen's Canning, the eight-and-a-half-foot billfish beat a 21-year-old Washington record - Phil Wolff's 134-pounder off Westport in September 2005. The only other benchmark catches of the species in state waters trace back to 1997. Both of those years were El Nino years, and so is this one: federal forecasters now give a "super" El Nino an 81 percent chance.
Dick Ogg, who runs a commercial boat and heads the Bodega Bay Fishermen's Association, told The Press Democrat the water was already behaving oddly at California's commercial salmon opener in May. His crew ran offshore expecting the cold water that fuels upwelling and found none of it. "A little wind brought in the cold water," Ogg said. "Then we couldn't find the warm water."
He frames it as part of the job rather than a surprise. "Fishermen are scientists," he said. "We are always monitoring current, water temperature, color and where we see changes. We look for change and variation as fishermen and we go fish on the edges of this change."
What worries him is habitat compression - warm water packing whales and fish into a narrower slice of ocean where the fleet also has to work.
California regulators are planning around exactly that. At an August 4 hearing of the state Legislature's Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture, the Department of Fish and Wildlife's Joanna Grable said the coming Dungeness crab season is being approached with caution.
"The department will likely take a conservative approach when opening the fishery this season," Grable said. "Management actions could include a season delay or reductions in the amount of gear depending on the level of (whale) entanglement risk."
NOAA Fisheries is more measured. Spokesperson Michael Milstein noted that the 2015-16 collapse - a crab season cut to roughly two months, with 71 percent of California's crab boats tied up - came after the marine heatwave called The Blob had already warmed the Pacific.
"This time, we have had some recent heatwaves but there may be less chance of El Nino adding to that," Milstein said in an email. "Rather, it may continue the warming created by the heatwave." Historically, he said, harmful algal blooms have tracked heatwaves more closely than El Nino, and the fallout "mainly affect shellfish, including Dungeness crab and recreational fisheries for clams and other shellfish."
The fleet has no cushion left either way. Commercial salmon only resumed this year after a three-year shutdown, while crab openings have slipped season after season.
"It basically took away what summer income these guys have," Ogg said of the delays. "Without that, you're basically waiting until January to get any more money and it's really hard."
State Senator Mike McGuire, the fisheries committee chair, valued California's commercial marine harvest at roughly $212 million raw and more than $1.2 billion in total economic impact. "Climate change continues to reshape our oceans, our rivers and our coastlines," he said. "Federal uncertainty has made long-term planning more difficult."
Climate scientist Daniel Swain, at a town hall McGuire convened, warned the pattern could become "an event we haven't seen before in living memory in California."
For now the forecasts stay hedged. The marlin on the scale at Ilwaco does not.